Is YA still for teens? (Misshelved #7)

In my scrapbook is a small sticker I made for myself. I printed it back when I first began writing about YA novels over a decade ago, when I was still a teenager. Emblazoned on it is the phrase “It’s okay to read YA!” At the time, even though YA was marketed toward teenagers, it was hardly the cultural and commercial powerhouse it is today, and it was covered with a thick veneer of dorkiness. The idea that adults might read YA, let alone that they would vastly outnumber teen readers of the category, had only just begun to be observed.

I liked the sticker. It reminded me that YA books were meant for me, that they were about characters like me: a 15-year-old girl, questioning the world, who loved to read.

This is an essay about who YA books are meant for today.

You might be surprised, then, that what inspired me to finish it was the announcement of a new middle grade novel.

At least, what was described by its marketing copy as a middle grade novel.

The announcement proclaimed that the book would be the middle grade debut of an established YA author. It would tell a fantastical story about a young girl who loses a family member and must learn to trust in herself. It sounded incredible, I thought—until I reread the description of the book and realized that the main character is 15 years old. A full-fledged teenager, even when the rules of fantasy world building mean that teenagers are sometimes treated more like adults, in a story about firsts that seems to include all the primary elements of a typical YA novel.

This book could very well be incredible.

But this book, described as the author’s debut into a category of books created for readers typically between the ages of 8 and 12, is not a book seemingly created with 8-year-olds in mind, nor even for voracious 10-year-olds. It is a book created for 12-year-olds, the oldest readers in the middle grade market, who often want to "read up" and find stories about kids just a wee bit older than them.

When an 8-year-old reads up, it means they’re reading into the entirety of middle grade, into books about 9-, 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds. But when a 12-year-old reads up, traditionally, that means they are beginning to move into reading YA, where they find a whole category filled with books suited to their reading abilities and their experiences of the world thus far. These books are designed with the human developmental stage of adolescence in mind and written in an accessible, fast-paced style to accommodate the many constraints placed on the free time of preteens and teenagers.

These books, with rare exceptions, no longer exist on today’s YA shelves.

YA books created for readers transitioning into the category and for readers on the younger, lower end of YA’s 12 to 18 age range, referred to as “younger” or “lower” YA, have been increasingly sidelined to the point of near nonexistence. Instead, today’s YA marketplace is bloated with "upper YA" books designed, at best, with older teens in mind and, at worst, created to appeal to—to “cross over” to, in industry parlance—adults. Such books are longer, their protagonists older, and their plots feature situations that are typically experienced by people older than 18. Upper YA has become so prevalent that some YA publishing imprints are dedicated entirely to publishing so-called “crossover” books—to capturing that much-desired adult purchasing power while still claiming their books are for teenagers.

In the current market, YA is not created for teenage readers. It is created for adults.

And as a result, the YA ecosystem—the teenage readers it was originally intended for, the authors who create it and the market as a whole—is suffering.

But why?
 

***

In order to understand where YA is today, we have to understand where it's been. We also have to understand what, exactly, YA is.

Let's take a quick look through time.

Though YA novels like Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer began to rise in commercial popularity in the early 1940s, shortly after the concept of “the teenager” gained mainstream recognition, the American Library Association didn't establish a professional organization specifically for librarians who provided services to teens until 1957, with the creation of what was then called the Young Adult Services Division and what is now known as YALSA.

Though advertisers in many industries had been slowly targeting more and more teenagers for decades, the formation of the YASD was a significant step toward recognizing the distinct role that YA books and library services to teenagers were beginning to play, both within the publishing industry and within American libraries.

YA was building its audience—especially through cheap paperbacks that teens could pick up at grocery stores. The “malt shop novels” successful during the 1950s and ’60s gave way to the gritty “problem novels” of the 1970s. YA began to broaden its genre horizons during the 1980s and early 1990s as fast-paced thrillers found shelf space (or, more accurately, spinner space) alongside popular friendship series like The Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High.

Then the boy wizard arrived.

After the success of the Harry Potter series brought on a commercial boom of children’s literature in the late 1990s, more and more YA was published to try to feed the growing demand. Barnes & Noble even created separate YA sections in its stores in 1997, in recognition of the increase in titles (and the perception that teens would be more likely to buy books if they didn’t have to go into the children’s area to find them).

However, these YA books were increasingly no longer published in the easily affordable and widely accessible mass market paperback formats that dominated the 1980s and early 1990s. The Harry Potter franchise finalized American trade children’s publishers’ shift into prioritizing hardcover and trade paperbacks over cheaper mass market editions, and previously successful mass market franchises like the Point Horror books and Sweet Valley High vanished. Less than a decade after Harry arrived in America, the 2005 success of Twilight locked in the focus of YA publishing on big, shiny profitable hardcovers in the commercial space.

Despite its winding history, the definition of YA itself has almost always remained the same: A YA book is a book about teenagers, for teenagers.

But what does that mean? What is a teenager, and what does it mean to write a book for teenagers?

According to YALSA:

Teens are not simply “older children” – they have reached a developmental stage that requires a different strategic approach in order to effectively understand, connect with and serve them. In addition, the needs and developmental abilities of younger teens ages 13 to 15 vary from those of older teens ages 16 to 18.

Unlike in adult publishing, where the audience for a book can be determined by genre (mystery? horror? romance?) and subject (history? memoir? cooking?), in children’s publishing, age category determines the target audience of a book. Today, most American children’s trade publishers break these categories down like this:

• board books (ages 0 to 2)

• picture books (ages 3 to 8)

• early readers and chapter books (ages 4 to 8)

• middle grade (ages 8 to 12)

• young adult (ages 13 to 18)

• adult (ages 18+)

Of course, some books published within each age category skew older or younger, and there are books with crossover appeal published between age categories. This, however, is broadly how age categories are viewed within the industry.

YA authors Dhonielle Clayton and Zoraida Córdova do a great job at describing the style expectations for YA novels in their podcast Deadine City. According to their criteria, YA novels must include four elements: a fast pace, high stakes, an immersive world and a thread of hope. Given that teenagers today have more competing for their attention than ever before, and that teens read print books less frequently even as they’re reading more overall, it’s no surprise that “a fast pace” is the first element on Clayton and Córdova’s list.

In addition to these elements, most YA novels also take a distinctive approach to the subjects they include. A teenager reading a YA book may have never read about a specific topic before, whether that’s brujas or abusive relationships (or both). Literary agent Kate McKean echoes this in her Substack post “YA vs Not YA” when she writes, “YA novels often deal with big issues—identity, family, love, sex, relationships, life-goals—because that’s what teens are dealing with at this time of their lives [and] YA books often deal with characters tackling this stuff for the first time, with the expectation that it’s going to impact their whole lives.”

Because of this distinctive YA approach, subjects included in YA novels are treated with a different level of nuance than the same subject would be in a book written for middle grade readers or for adults—a level that reflects the developmental needs. For example, compare three books about sexual assault—Chirp by Kate Messner, written for 10- to 12-year-olds; Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, written for teenagers; and Wrecked by Maria Padian, written for adults—and you’ll find three very different approaches to the writing style, nuance and what the books themselves ask of their readers.

Books that meet Clayton and Córdova’s list of YA must-haves have been published during almost every era of YA. From the malt shop novels of the 1950s and ’60s to the problem novels and friendship books of the ’70s and ’80s, fast-paced and immersive novels with high stakes and engaging topics—that didn’t end in total disaster and despair—have always been hallmarks that define YA.

Given what we know about the still-developing adolescent brain, there’s a reason this approach works—especially when it comes to escapist YA fiction. Escapist fiction, whether it’s romantic novels like Twilight or the pulp thrills of the Point Horror series, gives teenagers a chance to calm and rewire their rapidly developing brains. As associate clinical social worker Larissa Krause told me:

[Teenagers] go through this incredible growth neurologically. It’s like all these highways are launching out. [...] Our brain is going to crave explanation for whatever we’re witnessing, so we tell ourselves a story. [But] our brain needs a break. It needs to make sense of something. It needs to engage in curiosity and creativity.

This approach can make reading about subjects such as sexual assault, substance abuse, mental illness or racism less traumatizing for teen readers, because it focuses on reactions and processing, rather than on graphic depictions of the subject itself.

None of this is to say that teenagers can’t or don’t continue to read middle grade books. Or that teenagers can’t or don’t read adult books. (I did both!) But YA books are supposed to offer a unique literary space where teens can engage with content created specifically for readers at their stage of neurological and psychological development, about characters who are their age, and that offer them the opportunity to read and escape and grow.

YA books are about teenagers, for teenagers.

Or, at least, they’re supposed to be.
 

***

The success of Twilight in 2005 included something unexpected: a hardcore legion of fans who called themselves “TwiMoms.” Twilight succeeded in the commercial book market, which made it a very different and more powerful moneymaker than the institutional market success that most YA books at the time were experiencing, thanks in no small part to its unanticipated embrace by adults, including but far from limited to the so-called “TwiMoms.” In retrospect, its success heralded nothing less than a sea change in how YA books are created, promoted and consumed.

When the average reader thinks of the “book market,” they likely envision the bookcases full of books in their local independent bookstore, or a glowing computer screen filled with images of book covers as they scroll through bookstore websites. But when the American book publishing industry talks about the “book market,” that’s only part of what they mean.

In publishing—especially in children’s and YA publishing—the book market is usually divided into two major categories: the commercial market and the institutional market. The commercial market is where individual consumers purchase books for themselves through third-party retailers such as independent bookstores, chain bookstores such as Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million, online retailers, and “big box” stores such as Walmart, Target and Costco.

The purchaser in the institutional market, on the other hand, is, well, an institution. The most common institutional purchasers in children’s and YA publishing are public libraries and school libraries, along with schools themselves. Sometimes the books are then lent to individual readers, while in other situations, they might stay within the institution (like a classroom set of a single novel).

Though YA was successful in the commercial market from the 1950s to 1980s, the institutional market might have helped YA fiction survive the 1990s. In 1990, one editor even speculated whether the “the young adult novel was ready for burial” due to weakening sales, especially in the hardcover format usually purchased institutionally. Things got so bad that publishers, who had previously published far more fiction than nonfiction, reversed that ratio so that schools and libraries (who “continued to buy nonfiction to support curricular needs,” according to Michael Cart) would continue to provide sales.

After the boy wizard and the Cullen family renewed YA’s commercial market, both retailers and publishers began to take note of the phenomenon of the adult crossover reader of YA. But no success happens in a bubble. Three factors were drawing adult readers to YA and keeping them there, where they began to dramatically reshape the contours of the category.  

First: About five months after Little, Brown Books for Young Readers published Twilight, Twitter launched. I have written at length about the relationship between the YA publishing industry and Twitter; how YA publishing made its target audience—its readers, its bloggers, its BookTubers and Bookstagrammers—part of its professional network; and how the YA publishing industry decided that Twitter was an essential platform for YA writers. These decisions, given Twitter’s role as the “water cooler” of the publishing industry, centered adult voices. Even on the rare occasion that teenage voices broke through, they were rapidly pushed to the side—partially for their own safety, as legally underage minors interacting with adults, and partially because of the industry’s apparent desire to keep the focus on adults.

Second: Millennials became adults. It only takes a quick scroll through any social media platform to encounter the many, many jokes about how Millennials are trapped in an extended adolescence and denied many of the hallmarks of adulthood. Beneath those jokes lie stark realities. Millennials can’t afford to buy houses or to rent apartments; many still live with their parents. More Millennials, anecdotally, are not in romantic relationships than previous generations have been at their age. They were forced into workaholism, into the constant hustle for a job, or for two jobs, or for the 5 to 9 that follows a 9 to 5. (Hey, Dolly Parton, you’re great, love your Imagination Library and your recent contributions to world health, but that commercial is awful). And they’re doing all this in a world that is literally on fire.

Combine all that with the intensity of the Millennial “brand” that Millennials experienced early in their lives—the characterization of Millennials as the new kids on the block, with access to unlimited technology for the first time in human history, the first generation to enter the 21st century, uniquely prepared, ready and able to hustle—and it’s no surprise that many Millennials don’t feel like “real” adults.

Third: Along with the many, many jokes about Millennials came jokes about adult fiction, which began to get a bad rep among the Millennial book communities on social media, who mocked its self-important and indulgent interest in publishing stories about Real Adults™ who do taxes written exclusively by white men named Jonathan. Unless they were actively seeking out books in the adult fiction section of their local bookstore—and, given the way books are stocked in big box stores, it may have only worked in your local independent bookstore—readers would be stuck in their insular social media bubbles with no idea that authors from Emily Giffin and Curtis Sittenfeld to Alyssa Cole and Kiley Reid were publishing books of interest to them.

The combination of these factors—the rise of social media, the technical coming-of-age but extended adolescence of Millennials, and the failure of large swaths of the adult book market to satisfy Millennial tastes—meant that adults continued to buy YA. By 2012, 55% of people who bought YA books were adults, 78% of whom were not buying the books for anyone other than themselves, and publishers became determined to keep their attention, increasingly focusing on adult consumers over the teens they had once favored.

When adult readers are prioritized in YA, the books published into the YA category change, and the teen readers for whom the category is intended get left behind.
 

***

What happens if you treat YA as though it’s a genre intended for adults, rather than an age category intended for teens?

Genre determines what a book is about and sets expectations for how a story is told. Fantasy, romance and mystery are common book genres. Genres are not age categories, and age categories don’t determine genre. There are middle grade fantasies and YA romances and adult mysteries.

Genre expectations are obvious to readers of a genre. The best example is adult romance, which must have a happily ever after at the end of a book. But such expectations exist in all genres and subgenres. Mystery readers, for example, expect that a mystery will be solved by the end of a mystery novel. Just as the conventions of age categories also include expectations about writing style, so too do many genres, and style expectations are often similar within a genre, even across age categories. For example, in epic fantasy, a subgenre of fantasy that features sprawling stories, readers expect lengthy novels full of “purple prose,” regardless of whether the book in question is for middle grade readers, teens or adults.

Genres are not age categories, and age categories don’t determine genre.

But the more that publishers treat YA like a genre rather than an age category, the more they lose track of that distinction.

So what does the “genre” of YA look like when teen readers are forgotten? Some elements of Clayton and Córdova’s definition linger: Stories do usually have a faster pace than, say, some adult literary fiction.

But when YA is treated as a genre, the pace slows down. The books get longer by hundreds of pages. The approach to topics shifts, becomes more graphic, more mature, and characters are often depicted encountering situations for the second or third time, rather than the first.

When YA is treated as a genre, it begins to exclude many younger teens, so the younger age category of middle grade shifts upward to compensate, forced to fill the void that used to be occupied by younger YA. With upper middle grade booming to compensate for the absence of younger YA, the risk that younger readers might engage with content they might not be ready for because the books have been branded for them increases.

Of course, it’s not as if those kids would ignore those upwardly shifting upper middle grade books if they were rebranded YA. Readers in many age categories want to read up, both independently and because of the ongoing push from adults to read “real books” younger and faster. This pressure starts at an early age: The current perception of picture books is that they are “for babies,” when they were once for all kids up to age 7, and pushing young readers faster and faster into chapter books and from there onto “real” books encourages a culture of reading the next age category up as soon as you can. In the absence of younger YA that features 14-, 15- and 16-year-old protagonists, however, tween and teen readers who want escapist fiction that respects their developmental needs are left in the dust with nothing to read except stories intended for significantly older readers.

And I haven’t even mentioned how all of this has impacted the cost of books. Those mass market spinners are a thing of the past—but so is pricing YA novels in a way that’s remotely affordable for teens (who are increasingly excluded from the labor market). The average middle grade trade paperback costs $8. The average YA paperback? $13 to 15. Middle grade and YA hardcover editions should be priced under $20, but when a YA author becomes popular, especially with adults, the price of their books can and has jumped to $25 or more. The Hunger Games prequel published by Scholastic in the spring of 2020 was $27.99, as was Midnight Sun, the retelling of Twilight from the perspective of Edward Cullen published later that summer by Little, Brown.

Even as all of this unfolds, book communities treat actual adult novels (particularly those by BIPOC women) intentionally published for and priced for adult readers as though they are part of the YA “genre”—despite their lack of teenage protagonists and the fact that they take adult, not YA, approaches to their subjects—because a clear definition of what YA is no longer exists.

The waters are muddied, and the people who suffer most from the muddied waters? Actual teen readers.

Especially marginalized teen readers.
 

***

We cannot talk about the problems of today’s YA market without talking about the racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and classism that exists in the publishing industry.

In her book On Juneteenth, Annette Gordon-Reed, who is one of the most acclaimed historians working today, tells a story about desegregation. When American public schools began to be desegregated following the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Black students were moved into white schools and school districts. Black schools were forgotten, and the Black teachers they employed, who had been pillars in their community and closely connected to their students, were forced to find new positions, becoming substitute teachers or tutors or sometimes, but not often, teachers in those now-integrated schools.

Desegregation was, of course, a good thing, writes Gordon-Reed. But by assuming the white schooling experience was inherently the better one, and integrating Black students into white classrooms without also integrating white students into Black classrooms, the act of desegregation itself perpetuated the racism it had been designed to dismantle. Well-meaning white people assumed they knew what would be the best thing for Black students without stopping to consider the possibility that they could be wrong.

The experiences of people who are marginalized or historically excluded, whether they are Black, Indigenous, a person of color, queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent, or fat, are not inherently less than the experiences of people who are white, cis, het, or able-bodied. Marginalized experiences are not inherently traumatic.

And yet a quick glance at YA shelves in any bookstore today will reveal a pattern: Although diverse representation continues to (slowly, slowly) grow, many of the books being published to “diversify” those shelves are stories about trauma, whether it’s associated with a narrative about coming out, racist violence, or a character who overcomes the many systemic injustices associated with a historically marginalized or excluded identity. Many of these books seem positioned more at well-meaning Millennial adults in search of educational tools they can buy with their disposable income than at the more progressive teens of Gen Z who are just looking for a book to read for fun amid the juggling act of school, work, and maintaining their social media accounts.

In Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America, scholar Michael Eric Dyson observes that—despite the “Harry Potter generation” having sparked more activism than previous generations—white Millennials hold just as many racist ideas as their parents:

What we hear or see of race depends on who we are. There is little question that the mobile phone video recorder has affected a Gutenberg shift in the perception of race in America, though most of the recordings haven’t yet resulted in structural change. But while this device, and social and traditional media too, permit us to see more of race, they may not necessarily help us to see race more clearly or deeply. We brag in some quarters about how young white folk will automatically see race in a far more enlightened way than their parents, and yet, with the exception of a greater acceptance of interracial intimacy, Millenials see race in much the same ways as white Generation Xers and Baby Boomers. The frustrating continuity of race between white generations suggests that it takes more than youth to conquer deeply entrenched beliefs.

To echo Dyson’s idea: Although the push for more inclusive books has yielded a shift in the number of books by and about historically marginalized and excluded people published, it has not yet resulted in structural change within the publishing industry itself.

We need diverse books. We want diverse books. But we have published and championed them within an industry that does not actually value them, that forces unique, individual stories to stand in and stand for entire identities, as though those identities are both monolithic and interchangeable, and it shows.

According to the Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey from 2019, the publishing industry's workforce is 76% white, 97% cisgender, 81% straight, and 89% non-disabled. Despite the best efforts of organizations such as POC in Publishing, and despite the fact that We Need Diverse Books, the most well-known and active organization advocating for greater diversity in books, has YA as one of the primary focuses of its efforts, YA books are just as susceptible as books in all other sectors of publishing to the inclinations of their white publishers and their intended audience: white, able-bodied, cishet readers with enough pocket change to buy traditionally published YA books in the commercial market.

That means books about people from backgrounds that have been historically marginalized and excluded aren’t published by people from such backgrounds for consumption by other people from those backgrounds. Instead, they are published by an industry that is still structurally and systemically racist and privileged, an industry that assumes all marginalized experiences are traumatic, an industry that puts much of its money and support behind YA books about marginalized trauma. Within the commercial market, publishers promote these books toward adult YA readers with privilege, because they have the most purchasing power (which furthers the industry’s prioritization of hardcover books)—and, because these readers are privileged adults, they have the same expectations as publishers do about marginalization and trauma. These readers, many of whom mean well and want to support writers who have been historically marginalized and excluded, buy these books—which reinforces to the equally well-meaning publishers that books about trauma are the sort of books by and about people who have been historically marginalized and excluded that sell.

And so the cycle perpetuates itself.

This isn’t to say there aren’t exceptions. There are imprints and editors, publicists and marketers and sales reps who work to the best of their ability within the overarching system to change the system itself. There are books about marginalized joy that sell incredibly well—Leah Johnson’s You Should See Me In A Crown, for instance—but books about Korean romance or Deaf pride are published far less frequently than books that feature the pain of Black characters or traumatic coming out stories.

Books about trauma and pain are important, especially in a world filled with books that can act as windows and mirrors and sliding glass doors, as the groundbreaking children’s literature scholar Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop wrote. Teenagers deserve a wide variety of every kind of book, so they can find books that fit what they most want to read. I cannot and would not presume to speak for what every reader from every marginalized and historically excluded background could or should want to read.

But I can speak to what I notice and observe—and to what I know others are observing. In a video on Instagram in February, YA and middle grade author Nic Stone discusses her exhaustion and ends with a call to BIPOC viewers:

I’m so tired. It kills me that I have to monetize my pain and my trauma. The reason that I make the amount of money that I make is because I’m willing to monetize my own trauma. [...] I am here to tell you that even though I am exhausted, I am proof that you can put yourself in the spaces where you do not exist. I watched [American Skin] and I was reminded of the pain of my work. And I am also reminded of the power. And I want you all to recognize that you have the power. You have the power to create. You have the power to decide who you are going to be, and how you’re gonna present yourself to the world. And I think, most important of all, you have the power to decide what you believe about yourself, no matter what anybody else has to say.

But Stone shouldn’t need to remind her BIPOC readers, especially her teenage readers, of their infinite possibility. That possibility should be at the front and center of the YA books on their shelves. That is the thread of hope that YA authors should be writing toward.

As author Charlie Jane Anders writes in the introduction to her new book, Never Say You Can't Survive, "Visualizing a happier, just world is a direct assault on the forces trying to break your heart."

The YA publishing industry shouldn’t be forcing marginalized authors to monetize their trauma, especially for consumption by privileged adult readers. Publishing should empower authors to write for teens, so that teens can make, as Anders puts it, direct assaults on the forces trying to break their hearts.

Otherwise, what’s the point?
 

***

“But Nicole,” you might be crying, “the solution is so easy! We just need to separate out the older YA that’s so appealing to adults into the new adult category, and then YA will shake itself out. Problem solved!”

First introduced in by St. Martin’s in November 2009 in a writing contest, “new adult” is … not an age category. Or a genre. In 2009, St. Martin’s described it as “cutting-edge fiction with protagonists who are slightly older than YA ... fiction similar to YA that can be published and marketed as adult—a sort of an older YA or new adult.” St. Martin’s wanted stories that had adult characters, but that made the stylistic choices of YA novels.

New adult books exploded in the self-publishing market, perhaps thanks to algorithms that made the term particularly easy to search, but they struggled—and continue to struggle—in the traditional publishing market. Why? Part of it has to do with the reputation that new adult books earned as a subgenre of romance and erotica. New adult fans will often say they want more than that, though: They want literary and fantastical explorations of what it means to segue into life after you come of age. They want it to be its own, full-fledged category.

But, as literary agent Jennifer Laughran pointed out in a recent post on her Ask The Agent blog: “Publishers DO buy and publish these books—they just don’t call them ‘New Adult.’”

If you are somebody who desperately wants a new adult category in their local bookstore, please know, dear reader, that it is not your fault that you have struggled to find books you want to read. Unlike younger YA, which has vanished almost entirely from shelves, books you will enjoy do exist. They just aren’t clearly labeled.

They are—and I hate to tell you this—adult books.

And I know that can be hard. It’s hard for all the same reasons that upper YA is booming. You’re legally an adult, but you don’t feel like an adult, so visiting the adult fiction section of a bookstore feels like walking around in your parent’s shoes did when you were little: a little clunky, too big, doesn’t fit quite right. After all, adult fiction is a section —as you have seen in many a meme—filled with books by men named Jonathan, about Real Adults™ who do their taxes.

That doesn’t mean books you’ll enjoy aren’t there too. It just means they’re a little harder to find.

But asking for recommendations, talking to any independent bookseller, or simply exploring the adult shelves of your local bookstore will all guide you to what you want.

Adult fiction with fast-paced, emotionally driven narratives exists in the adult space. It is why some of Sarah J. Maas’ work was recategorized as adult, with shiny new BISACs and covers and everything. It is why many romance authors succeed, as do books in other genres about protagonists in their teens and 20s by authors like Brit Bennett, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Seanan McGuire and so many more.

You only have to look for them.

And publishers only have to stop shoving them into YA.
 

***

There are even more reasons to believe that YA increasingly centers adult readers.

We could talk about how the most influential awards for children’s and YA books about kids and teens are chosen by librarians, who are crucial gatekeepers within the kidlit and YA industries, but who themselves are mostly white adults who are not themselves writers, whose jobs and professional norms mean their tastes skew toward the literary over the fun, toward the educational over the fantastical, and whose ideas of "best" or “quality” do not always line up with what kids actually want to read.

We could talk about how adults who write about books for highly influential pre-publication review outlets have tastes that tend to skew the same—and how, given that many of those publications only cover books being published in hardcover, they continue to prioritize books that only adult readers can afford and box in what books are “acceptable” to give to actual teenagers.

We could talk about how The New York Times YA bestseller list—which only counts hardcovers toward its rankings, while excluding more affordable paperbacks—is not created based purely on sales figures, but involves an unknown level of curation by the New York Times staff, a mostly white group of adults with their own opinions about what sorts of books deserve to earn the highly coveted (and, let’s not forget, highly lucrative) designation of New York Times bestseller.

We could talk about how listening to audiobooks while doing homework, or reading fanfiction on the bus, or reading Webtoons before bed may be more accessible for many teens than physical books or even eBooks—and how those forms of reading are dismissed as not “real reading,” especially compared to the reading they must do for school, which causes teens to internalize the idea that they don't like reading and alienates them further from the books supposedly meant for them.

We could talk about how TikTok may be reclaiming some of the power for both teens and adults to find books that work for them—and how it simultaneously continues to blur the lines between YA and adult, as influencers promote both together or beside each other with little regard for the distinctions between them or their intended readerships.

We could even talk about the expectations placed on Generation Z to solve all the problems created by older generations, from climate activism to gun violence—expectations that force them to grow up faster, leaving typical teenage activities behind in favor of trying to literally save the world.

But we do not have time to discuss all of these, not in as much nuance and detail as I would like. After all, this is only one essay, and some of these things are outside my expertise.

Still. It is good to think about such things. It is good to realize that there is so much more to think about than what is on just this screen.
 

***

It’s complicated, isn’t it?

YA, as we knew it before its boom in the early 2000s, is gone. There are no affordable paperbacks for teens to buy with pocket change and tear their way through with friends. There are hardcovers at prices teens can’t really afford, released on a much slower schedule. There are stories that are shaped by adults, and marketed for adults, and purchased by adults, which enforces to the adults shaping the stories that this is what the YA category is supposed to be.

It is not.

Historically and at present, teenagers are some of the most disempowered people in American society, with very little agency or control over what happens to them or how they live their lives. They mostly can’t vote. It’s very difficult for them to earn their own money. They often can’t make basic decisions about even their own bodies without parental permission. A 2015 Alliance for Excellence in Education report revealed that middle and high school education receives far less federal funding than early childhood and postsecondary education, and that the amount of funding has been decreasing for years.

But the solution is not so easy as saying, “Oh, we want to go back to what YA was like in the ’90s! We want to go back to what YA was like in the ’00s!”

There are fantastic things happening in the YA market right now. The call for inclusive books is long-needed and necessary, and representation can and will continue to grow across the board. Authors should not have to write series at the pace of a book a month for ravenous teen readers as digital content like webcomics and fanfiction meets that need—and writing a book a month is unsustainable and ends with creative burnout anyway.

But there are things we need to change.

Wayne W. Dyer once wrote, “Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.”

Publishing needs to change the way it looks at YA.

It’s happened before. At a YALSA conference in 1994, publisher Linda Zuckerman declared that she thought “young adult literature is dying.” In 1996, Patty Campbell lamented in her regular column for The Horn Book that “We have lost the upper half of YA—those fourteen-to-nineteen-year-olds who were the original readership of the genre.” In the 25 years since those declarations, YA has shifted to become a bloated market aimed at adult readers, but it doesn’t mean we can’t shift it back.

We have the power to change how we view YA. We, as writers. We, as booksellers and librarians and publishing professionals. We, as readers.

When Zoraida Córdova says, “I do think that the only answer is ‘you want to write YA’ because you want to write for a YA audience. For YA readers. For teens,” that doesn’t mean for a writer’s past teen self. It doesn’t mean for some imagined, hypothetical teen. It definitely doesn’t mean for adults who want to feel like teenagers again.

It means for real teenagers who are reading now.

Some YA authors are doing just that. There is, for instance, a YA book coming out soon in which a teenager combs through her father’s old LiveJournal for clues about her birth mother—something sure to make Millennials feel ancient but will make perfect sense to today’s tech-savvy teens. There are plenty of other examples of authors who are writing to an actual teenage audience.

But individual examples among the crushing swell of an industry focused on books for adult readers is not enough. Authors must carefully consider who they are writing for when they say they want to write YA. Is their book actually YA—or do they just feel uncomfortable writing in any other age category?

In the same vein, publishers must reconsider how they are publishing young adult fiction. Will they? No. Probably not. Publishing is notoriously slow to change and will continue to pursue whatever sells in the short-term, regardless of whether a shift could earn more in the long-term.

Individual actors within the industry, particularly literary agents and editors, can do what publishing as a whole cannot. Yes, they must publish books where they can sell, but they can also consider how and why those books are being published in that age category and at a given price, whether they could do better elsewhere, and whether they are being sold simply to chase a spot on the New York Times bestseller list.

And, of course, we must become cognizant of and advocate against the practice of selling marginalized trauma to privileged adults in the guise of educating teens. As author Bethany C. Morrow writes, “A distinction BIPOC writers can make that I don't think publishing as a whole can: when we talk about trauma stories and not wanting them to dominate our work and rep, we're aware that instances of racism etc may still be IN the stories. That's reality. It's not THE story.”

While serious stories about social issues will always have a place in YA, especially for teens seeking mirrors of their experiences or sliding glass doors into new ones, the pressure placed on BIPOC and other historically marginalized and excluded authors to monetize their pain needs to change. Finding a better balance in the ratio of pain to joy on today’s shelves should be at the forefront of the minds of every publisher who claims they want diverse books. That thread of hope must return to the forefront of the teenage imagination.

There will always be a place for older and crossover YA fiction, just as there is always a space for older middle grade fiction and younger adult fiction. There will always be a space for adults to read YA, just as there is always a space for adults to read middle grade novels or picture books, and just as there is a space for teens to read middle grade novels or adult books. People can and should read what sparks joy and sings to their heart.

Publishing, however, needs to stop centering adult voices in the conversations about YA books, and the adult communities that have formed around YA books need to stop critiquing and judging those books as if their voices are the most important ones in the conversation—as if the books have been created for them.

Teenagers deserve better. Teenagers deserve books written for them, designed for them, and about characters like them. Teenagers deserve to see their own experiences, and the experiences of their peers, reflected back at them in the books they read—not warped through a distorted lens so that it appeals to privileged adults with more money.

Teenagers deserve YA books.

It’s about time we give YA back to them.
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Nicole Brinkley has short hair and loves dragons. The rest changes without notice. She is the manager of Oblong Books. Her opinions are her own. If you like this newsletter, consider supporting her on Patreon.

This essay was edited by Stephanie Appell. Read more of Stephanie's work at bookpage.com, where she is the children's and YA editor, or say hi on Twitter @noseinabookgirl. Her opinions are also her own.
 

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Additional research and inspiration for this piece came from these books and articles:

The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination From Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, published in 2019 by New York University Press
 
The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts: The Library and the Young Adult, centennial edition, by Margaret A. Edwards, published in 2002 by the American Library Association

“Genre as Nexus: The Novel for Children and Young Adults,” by Mike Cadden, in Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Shelby A. Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso, and Christine A. Jenkins, published in 2011 by Routledge

Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America by Beverly Lyon Clark, published in 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of ’80s and ’90s Teen Fiction by Gabrielle Moss, published in 2018 by Quirk Books

“School Libraries and the Transformation of Readers and Reading,” by Eliza T. Dresang and M. Bowie Kotrla, in Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Shelby A. Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso, and Christine A. Jenkins, published in 2011 by Routledge

“YA Grows Up: Teen Protagonists Step into Adulthood,” by Katy Hershberger, published in 2021 by School Library Journal

Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism, 2nd edition, by Michael Cart, published in 2011 by the American Library Association

Many thanks to the many publishing professionals whose conversations with me have also informed this piece.